


(Don’t) Follow Me Down

by eleventy7



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: F/M, Inspired by Hades and Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:26:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26228647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleventy7/pseuds/eleventy7
Summary: Katara is the dread queen of the underworld, ruler of the dead, destined to reign her cold kingdom alone. Until a sun god catches her eye.
Relationships: Katara/Zuko
Comments: 68
Kudos: 452





	(Don’t) Follow Me Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thatsoreyes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsoreyes/gifts).



> This isn’t an exact re-telling of the myth, but (roughly) follows the plot and has strong elements taken from Greek mythology.

The world between living and dead is cold and white.

The rivers flow dark between glaciers, and the tundras are smooth and flat as glass. Lost spirits wander the world like lonely shadows, drifting over ice and snow. The wind always blows cold. The oceanids visit sometimes, swimming through the currents to arrive at the between-world. They skim across the water, quick and playful spirits, surfacing briefly to flash silver before vanishing again. Katara watches them come and go, darting around the shallows. They like the shallows. It’s where the little spirits play. The shallows are safe and bright and busy.

It’s not a bad place for Katara and her brother to hide. Ancient grudges have bubbled to the surface in the mortal realm, and the old gods and new gods teeter together on the brink of war. But here, in this small world, all is quiet.

Katara spends plenty of time by the shallows. But sometimes, beneath the splashing and soft murmur of water, she thinks she can hear something else.

And she lifts her gaze to the dark horizon.

* * *

Sometimes, especially when the midnight sun comes, she thinks she can hear the ocean call her name. On those nights, the oceanids scatter to their hiding places and won’t come no matter how the gods call, and the sun rides low in the sky.

“It’s not the ocean calling you,” an old snow spirit named Kanna says.

“Then who?”

“It’s the depths below.”

The depths _are_ the ocean, Katara argues, but Kanna is silent.

* * *

The land of the midnight sun burns bright. The tundras are so white and crisp they cut the horizon into two: the white land, the azuline sky. One of the spirits — a little boy — is shouting at that endless sky when Katara wakes up.

“Sun madness,” Sokka says as he sharpens his trident. “Tragic. Heard a story about one of the old ice spirits — ”

“Yes, yes. Midnight madness. Stared at the sun and went blind. Heard it a million times.”

Sokka tries hard to maintain a bit of solemn warning. “And her eyes — ”

“Like two black coals. Bit of glowing red in the centre of each one. Like the fire-horses that pull the sun across the sky each day.”

Sokka gets uneasy then. “Let’s speak of other things.”

Katara looks up at the blue sky. “I miss the moon.”

“It’ll be here soon enough.”

“Don’t you miss the darkness?”

“It’ll be here soon enough,” Sokka repeats firmly, standing up.

Katara tilts her head.

The sea is calling.

* * *

The old gods are falling. They are losing their battles.

Sokka readies for war, though childhood is still soft upon his face. He is too keen for the future, Katara thinks. He holds himself taut as a bowstring, ready to take flight on the smallest murmur of the east winds. 

Perhaps he will become a war god, old Kanna says.

”Is that my fate too?”

Kanna’s face softens. No, of course not. Fortune will consider other fates. Katara is not meant for war.

Katara agrees. “The ocean calls,” she says.

Kanna’s face goes still, but she does not say, _that’s not the ocean._

She only turns silently away.

* * *

Melancholia hangs over Katara like a cloud. Her parents are both going to die — she knows it in her heart. And her brother is keen to join the war despite his youth and inexperience. She will lose him too.

So she roams the tundras, restless and disquiet, and she finds herself following the dark rivers that run from one end of the realm to the other. From the ocean on the safe side — where lie the shallows, blue and bright, busy and light, warmed from the currents brought from the mortal realm — to the ocean on the _other_ side. The Sea of the Dead. Black and endless, waiting patiently to swallow up the dead souls and take them to the River Styx. Some people linger long in the rivers threading through the ice, and slowly drift towards the Sea of the Dead. Others — especially the small and mewling babies — vanish within moments.

Katara stands by one of the rivers, just a few steps away from the Sea of the Dead, and gazes down at those destined to die. A woman drifts by, caught in the icy currents of the river, a boy in her arms. They cling to each other but — just for a moment — he slips from her embrace and she is pulled into the sea, and sinks slowly and silently into darkness.

The boy lingers by the mouth of the river, only a few lengths away from the Sea of the Dead. A fever has ahold of him; his eyes are bright, his skin flushed, and his expression is frightened.

Katara has seen countless souls pass through this lonely land, and she has never once reached out to any of them. They are wretched little things, their fate inescapable, and she need not intervene. But her thoughts are still preoccupied with the inevitable deaths of her parents, and she watches this boy reach out, searching blindly for the arms of his mother, who only moments ago was with him.

But she is gone now. 

Katara moves to turn away. The law of the land is unbreakable, and she is only a small spirit, the daughter of two dying gods, and she holds no powers.

And yet — and yet — 

The boy drifts closer to the Sea of the Dead, and the tides begin to carry him away, and yet —

The sea is calling.

So Katara answers it.

She plunges into the water, swimming into the darkness. Some of the souls are screaming and wretched, and some are sobbing and trembling, and some are chanting in frenzied prayer. Not him. He is quiet, eyes bright with fever, his hair fanning out behind him, his clothes of red and gold slowly darkening as the water pulls him deep below the surface. In a moment, he’ll be lost to the seething mass of souls.

_You cannot have him._

The voice speaks to her, dark and rolling as thunder. She has woken one of the underworld guardians. Koh, with her smooth white face of bone and eyes like onyx.

_All souls to me._

Katara reaches out a hand and catches ahold of the boy. He does cry out then, as she pulls him to the surface and drags him closer to her. He is warm beyond a fever, she realises; there is a brightness within, faint but present. He must be a sun spirit.

“What’s your name?” she says urgently, for the tides are already reaching for him again. He needs to go back to the world of the living. But he only struggles in the water, writhing in the grip of fever. “Your name. I can’t take you back without a name.”

He shivers. The depths below are calling him.

“Your name!”

“Zuko,” he says at last, his voice thin and frightened, but Katara reaches for the icy surface and calls out boldly.

 _Zuko_ , she says, giving the name to the warmer currents of the south. They will carry his name back to the mortal realm, and beckon him back to the living. She sweeps a hand through the water.

She is not Koh with her long boathook, nor is she one of the judges three, but she is the daughter of the gods and the depths below call her. So the currents twist between her hands, this way and that, unconvinced and yet unable to deny her. _Zuko belongs above_ , she tells them. _Above, above. Not here._

And then, in her mind, she sees it — the great seething Sea of the Dead, extending all the way to the underworld, and the currents pushing and pulling, and with one swift motion she sends Zuko back along the river. For a moment he drifts aimlessly.

But then the warm flush recedes from his skin, and the fever softens just slightly, and he catches ahold of a current returning him to the shallows. 

Katara watches him disappear from sight.

* * *

When the days are the longest, they make the sacrifices. The stains always show up on the snow. The tundra becomes scarlet with blood, then slowly fades to a soft pink. Katara can feel the blood singing out to her, and the soul of the life contained within, but she resolutely turns her face to the biting wind.

“The souls are not for you,” Kanna tells her. “I know it, in my bones. Do not worry. It is not your fate. Perhaps it is Sokka’s. Death is close to war, after all.”

But Katara doesn’t think it _is_ Sokka’s fate. He paints the broad strokes of blood on his face and says the prayers and he’s solemn, but he doesn’t _feel_ the sacrifice. Not like she does.

He doesn’t hear the ocean calling, either.

* * *

Sokka and Katara sometimes visit the mortal realm, their footsteps cautious and quiet. Sokka immediately falls in love with the world. He loves the sunrises, the sunsets. He loves the grass and the earth and the trees.

Katara misses the ancient glaciers of the in-between world.

Sokka, on the other hand, lingers long in the mortal realm. He walks the valleys and hills, and swims the seas, and speaks to anybody he comes across, and he falls in love with a sea-breeze goddess named Suki. Foolish, Katara tells him. It will not bode well.

Sokka doesn’t seem to care. The colours and scents and people of this world have made him reckless and hopeful.

The east wind comes, and they hide from it, sheltering in a field of wheat. The wind carries bloodshed and the cries of the damned; the battles of the old and new gods goes on and on. Sokka will join them soon, Katara thinks miserably. She hopes the war will end before that happens.

The northern wind comes days later, and they welcome it with open arms. It brings a soft invitation of warmer weather, and washes red and gold over the sunlit fields. 

Red and gold, red and gold.

She thinks of the boy she saved.

Zuko.

He would have let all these fields grow strong beneath the sunlight, she thinks with fondness, and she carefully plucks a sheaf of wheat from its stalk. Ice flashes over it like moonlight, and the sheaf shrivels up, black and frost-dead.   


Katara stares down at the sheaf, and then slowly lets it fall from her hands, and does not again touch the harvest.

* * *

She asks Sokka where the sun spirits live. He’s lazing about in a rock-pool with Suki, looking quite content, though his expression grows displeased when she appears.

”What?” he asks her. “I’m _busy_.”

”Where do the sun spirits live?”

”Why do you want to know _that?”_

Katara frowns at him. The sea washes over her feet, cold beneath the tepid sunlight. “I’m curious.”

“Stay away from the sun spirits,” Sokka says bluntly. “You’re not meant for them.”

She falls silent. The tides creep away again, suddenly timid.

“I’m sorry,” Sokka says after a beat.

“Why? It’s true,” Katara says, trying to make her voice as quick and free as one of Suki’s breezes.

But Katara is not quick and free, and her voice is too heavy, and Sokka looks at her.

He sighs.

“In the centre of Caldera,” he says. “That’s where the sun spirits linger.”

“Thank you.”

“You won’t be thanking me,” Sokka mutters, turning away, and the tides recede until they’re a distant line of white-crested blue.

Katara lifts her face to the breeze.

* * *

Sokka was right.

The sun spirits are not for Katara.

The sunlight filters through the trees. The fields are awash with light of gold. The spirits drift lazily around like tiny dust motes, caught in the sunbeams.

Zuko is here. He is no little sun spirit now, weakened by illness. He is a god of sunlight. He watches over the fields with eyes the same colour as a ripe harvest, and his presence drifts over the land like smoke, bringing warmth and light.

Katara doesn’t belong here. The sun spirits shy away from her; they know who she truly is. Who she will become. She looks down at her robes of darkness. Ice forms along her skin. When she glances behind her, she can see a long trail of blackened wheat.

When she looks back to Zuko, he’s staring at her.

Katara turns and flees. She hears him call out, but she reaches the river and plunges down, letting the cold water swallow her. He leaps after her and she panics, sending the currents rushing toward him.

 _Don’t follow me down_ , she tells him.

When she opens her eyes, she is in a sea of black, and Koh’s face is a white gleam in the darkness.

_All souls to me._

* * *

Sokka and Katara return to their icy home, but Sokka does not seem too heartsick at the idea of leaving Suki behind. He will return soon, he explains. The final battle is upon the world.

He’s right.

The old gods die.

Katara’s parents were always myths. It’s been years and years since she’s seen either of them. She saw her mother’s death — shattering ice, rending glaciers, rising seas — but Hakoda’s death was a great chill that cut along her spine like a razor.

And then he’s gone.

She roams the icy little world between living and dead, and she cries for her dead mother and her dead father. She cries for the uncertainty of her fate, and the loneliness of the wide white tundras, and the silent glaciers and the midnight sun that shines constant and relentless. She touches a hand to the pendant that hangs heavy on her neck; an ancient protective amulet given to her by her mother. 

And beneath all her misery, she thinks she can hear _him_. Here. 

Katara races to the Sea of the Dead.

* * *

Zuko is adrift once more on the rivers. There is illness again, but this time it is not a warm fever; his skin is pale, and his lips tinged blue. He does not drift aimlessly along the rivers, but is carried along on fast currents. The river mouth is a black maw waiting to greet him. Death is but a mere moment away.

Katara reaches down and seizes ahold of him.

And then Koh, the river guardian, rises up soundlessly from the Sea of the Dead.

_All souls to me._

The right answer — the _only_ answer — is _all souls to you_. But Katara opens her mouth, and says, “Not his.”

_All souls._

Katara yanks hard on Zuko, but the currents have an iron grip on him now. “Not _his_. I will pay his price.”

Koh reaches out and seizes Katara’s face, her bony fingers digging into her skull, staring deep into her mind. She considers her for a long moment, her eyes nothing but darkness, then turns away. _For you? A gift_ , she says.

Katara knows then. Koh does not offer gifts to anyone. And yet she still asks, carefully, because even when lives are at stake, deals should never be made lightly with the guardians of the underworld. “What sort of gift?”

Koh considers her impassively. _A coronation gift._

Katara bows low. When she rises again, Koh’s face is a shifting cloak of shadows. She watches as Katara submerges herself in the river. The fingers of the desperate souls wrap around her; they turn to ice and shatter. She will never be dragged beneath the currents.

She cannot drown in the sea that she reigns.

Zuko is cold to touch, and when she touches him, he only gets colder. The frost creeps along his skin. Katara stops it, forcing her powers to subside, to slink away until she calls them forth again. His eyes do not open. Half his face is cloaked in a cruel curse; she recognises the mark of the storm god, Ozai. One of the old gods. Zuko must have been wounded in the final battle.

The Sea of the Dead is nearly upon them.

“What ails him?” Katara calls. Koh turns her featureless face to her.

_I do not concern myself with the sickness of the living. They only live a day or so before dying. So fragile._

To Koh, a human lifetime is undoubtedly just a day. Katara pulls Zuko against the tides. He is heavy in her arms, but she is growing stronger. Soon, she will rule the underworld. And even the currents must bend to her will.

His hair is long, and fans out across the water like a dark shadow. He wears a cloak, pinned closed by a gold pin, and even now — in the last throes of death — she can sense his powers of light and warmth, deep within his heart. Katara tightens her grip on his tunic and pulls, dragging him with single-minded determination against the currents. The water parts for her. The river lets her through. She reaches out, searching for the pull of the other current, the one where life burns so bright and warm it hurts to see. Like Zuko, she thinks, feeling the warmth creep back into his skin as she pulls him closer and closer to the bright shallows.

At last, she’s done her work. The current of life catches him, and he is borne away.

* * *

The children of the old gods rise, rise, rise. Like new suns, bright and blazing and defiant. Their day is young, still steeped in dawn. Their creators have fallen.The world is theirs now. The spoils of war await.

To Aang, the sky; he sets out for the heavens, the light fading behind him. To Toph, daughter of the ancient harvest gods, the fields and pastures. To Sokka, the sea. He leaves at once, rising up to claim the oceans. Katara has the feeling the tides might bring him often to the shores of Suki’s island.

Katara returns to the tundras to farewell her home. Kanna is deeply unhappy.

“Every little spirit dreams of the living world,” she tells Katara sadly. “You were supposed to live _there_.”

But Katara is no longer a lonely little ice sprite, wandering the tundras and skittering away from the Sea of the Dead. No; now she goes gladly to the sea, and speaks to the guardians, and listens.

The depths are calling her.

They’ve always called her.

So she lets herself sink into the darkness, and Koh’s white face gleams at her, a shadowed skull, and she bows her head low.

The new dread queen has arrived.

* * *

Her realm is endless, from the ceaseless tides of the Sea of the Dead to the Fields of Mourning. Katara learns the lay of her kingdom like the currents of her childhood rivers. She rules over the dead, and she learns the little tells of their souls. The weight of their regrets and the lightness of their joys. The coldness of bitter memories and the soft warmth of their fond recollections. She can trail a hand through the underworld rivers and touch a million souls, and she knows the sum of their lives. She knows their debts, their credits, and the balance lived between.

Each soul has its place, and she learns those places well.

And yet...

She can feel one empty spot.

 _Zuko_.

* * *

She spends her days walking her realm, ensuring every soul is in its rightful place. The years pass, and death never changes. The souls come, yet they never go.

One day, she goes to the very border of her realm and visits the Sea of the Dead. Koh stands impassive, her eyes like two coals burning in snow.

 _The soul you seek,_ Koh says, _waits here not._

Katara dips her hand into the sea. The souls stream past. None of them are _his_.

“I’m not seeking a soul,” she lies to Koh. “I’ve no interest in the living now.”

Koh regards her silently.

Katara glances up. The darkness seems to stretch on forever, but she can sense the edges of the mortal world, drifting far above like wispy clouds.

“I might visit my brother,” she says suddenly.

Koh turns away, resting her hands on her boathook, and surveys her seething sea of souls.

* * *

Sokka is...Sokka. As same as he ever is. He’s lounging about in a rock pool, murmuring something to a smiling Suki. Katara interrupts them without regret, stepping into view.

“I heard there was a storm upon the shores of Kyoshi,” she says.

Suki smiles, tilting her face to Katara. “Sokka had a tantrum.”

“I did not,” Sokka begins lightly, but Katara interrupts.

“It sent many souls my way.”

Suki’s smile fades. Sokka gets up and takes Katara aside.

“It is difficult,” he says, “to create a romantic moment when my sister, the dread queen of the underworld, shows up to mention all the mortals I took.”

“Suki is a goddess of the sea breezes. She knows the sacrifices we need to survive,” Katara points out.

“She is a gentle, minor goddess who must be shielded from our harsh world.”

Katara glances at Suki. “She sent me a ship filled with drowned sailors. Died on a squall she sent upon the rocks.”

“Again, it is _difficult_ to create a romantic moment when _you_ — the queen of the dead — are standing here.”

Katara hesitates. “Have you heard any news of Zuko? He’s a sun god — ”

”Him? The ruler of the sun-fields?” Sokka pauses, narrowing his eyes. “Why?

”I only wondered — ”

”I wouldn’t do that.” The waves crash on the beach with a little more agitation than they did before. “Turn your attention to other matters.”

Katara cannot help the bitterness in her voice. “Are you happy with Suki?”

Sokka looks at her. “I’m sorry,” he says, and she can hear the regret in his voice. “If I could have, I would have claimed the underworld myself, and given you the oceans.”

He means it, she thinks, and her anger dissolves, leaving only sorrow.

She leaves, and the mists of the underworld hang heavy in her heart.

* * *

Katara stays away from the mortal realm for a month. She busies herself learning the ways of her realm, from the meadows of Asphodel to the rivers of the dead. To the Fields of Mourning, where the myrtle groves are quiet and dark. To the delta of the underworld, where the five rivers meet, and the mists hang heavy over the marshes. It’s always twilight in the riverlands. A perpetually dim evening. The water is heavy in the sodden earth, heavy in the air. Katara always liked feeling the water all around her.

But now she dreams of sunlit fields, with air clear and heady with the smell of sunburnt grass.   


She dreams of warmth.

She dreams of him.

* * *

No gods ever visit Katara, even her own brother. Sometimes, a god or spirit has a task that brings them uneasily to the edge of her realm. They peer into the depths of the Styx or shift restlessly about on the shores of the Sea of the Dead, but they can’t quite bring themselves to cross into the heart of the realm. Sokka leaves messages for her; sometimes a little current comes from the ocean and finds its way down one of the rivers. _Come and see me._

But he doesn’t visit her.

It’s lonely, she thinks.

The souls rush through, singing and screaming, roiling and racing, onwards and downwards.

* * *

She visits the sun-fields, partially just to spite Sokka. But something has happened. The sun spirits are all hiding, and the fields are withering beneath the blaze of the relentless sun. Her god is nowhere in sight, but a sun goddess — Azula — stalks the fields. Katara has never liked her. She burns too bright, too fast, and her anger is seared across the land.

She leaves and finds Sokka on a distant beach.

“What burns the sun-fields?”

“Azula is in a mood,” Sokka says absently, busy watching the waves roll in, bringing the prayers of the mortals. “Throwing tantrums again.”

”About what?”

Sokka explains it to her. Since Ozai was cast down along with the rest of the old gods, his two children have been in constant battle for his domain. When Azula wins, the sky blazes blue and the crops wither from merciless heat. When Zuko wins, the sunshine is gentle and the rains are allowed to come. But Azula has cast him out now.

“Where is Zuko?”

Sokka is busy lording over his offerings, but he spares her a shrug. Who knows. Azula is strong. 

Zuko is strong too, Katara points out.

It is a mistake. Sokka straightens up and looks at her. “Why do you care?”

Katara glances away.

Sokka sighs. “He is a _sun god._ That future is empty.”

She turns away silently.

* * *

Katara searches high and low for Zuko; it takes a long time. Katara can only spend little glimpses of time upon the mortal realm before needing to returning once more to her dark world. But each time she surfaces in the mortal realm, she looks, and one morning she finds Zuko sheltering beneath the great oak Iroh, the tree of protection, from which the first cool shade was cast upon relieved mortals.

Zuko does not greet her. He stares down at the dappled sunlight dancing over the ground, silent and withdrawn.

There’s a restlessness in his soul. She can sense it. His father has gone, but left a troubled legacy. Ozai’s curse is etched permanently upon Zuko’s face, it seems. Azula roams wild, a careless sun goddess. She wishes to destroy everything, Katara thinks, and one day she will devour herself. She is a coiled snake, eating her own tail in her mindless destruction.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Zuko says without looking up, and there’s a bitterness in his voice that doesn’t belong there.

Katara hesitates. “I only wanted to see — ”

“Well, now you’ve seen.” He turns his face away. The bitterness has increased, sharp and unkind.

Katara thinks of his troubles with Azula, and wishes she could offer reassurance. “There is nothing for you here,” she tells Zuko, and it is supposed to be sympathetic and soft, but it is a mistake. He glances up at her, eyes flashing amber in the sunlight.

“And I suppose you think there’s something for me in _your_ dark, cold world?” he asks cuttingly, and he vanishes in a moment, taking the form of a little sun spirit, and the tiny speck drifts in the light for just a moment before disappearing.

Her sun god is gone.

* * *

She mourns him as one mourns the death of a lover. The mists hang heavy, the rivers run fast, the fields grow fallow. The guardians sit silent. The dead drift on their doomed currents. The white shores lay littered with bones like black coral.

Sokka does not approve. He sends a current, warm and bright, from the mortal world.

Katara sends it back. She immerses herself in the River Lethe instead, and feels the soft fingers of Hypnos in her hair and his humming in her ear.

But she is immune to his spell, and eternal sleep is not her fate.

She closes her eyes, pretending for just a moment —

There’s a disturbance by the River Styx. She can feel it; something is wrong.

Katara sighs and steps from the river.

* * *

Sokka is displeased. He’s come all the way down here, to the very shores of this creepy black river, and Koh is staring at him with her horrible skull-face and making him feel very uneasy, and Katara is not the _slightest_ bit grateful?

“No,” she says. “Because I said — ”

“Yes, yes — ”

“I _said_ — ”

“I know, you don’t have to repeat — ”

“I _said_ don’t interfere.”

Sokka looks annoyed. He’s not interfering, he is counselling. _If_ Katara remembers, his first love, Yue, the goddess of the moon, sacrificed herself to save the ungrateful mortals —

“I remember.”

— and did Sokka immerse himself in the River Lethe and pray for amnesia? No.

Sokka is being dramatic, Katara points out firmly. She is hardly praying for amnesia. Unless Sokka insists on continuing with his counsel, in which case she may very well consider the sweet release of eternal oblivion.

Sokka leaves, though he pulls a childish face at the impassive Koh first.

There goes the god of the oceans, summoner of sea storms, feared lord of the waves.

Oddly enough, Katara _does_ feel slightly better after his visit.

* * *

When Katara enters the mortal realm a month later, rising through the earth in a calculated move to avoid the attention of her brother, she regrets it almost at once. For Toph is waiting above, and very nearly flattens Katara back into the earth.

“That was a _plain_ , dread queen,” Toph says. “A _flat_ plain, as tradition requires.”

Katara glances down at the cratered earth. Well, she has to rise above the underworld somehow. It’s not _her_ fault.

“What about the ocean?”

Katara says nothing. Toph is delighted.

“Are you avoiding Sokka? _You_ , the dread queen, ruler of the dead, afraid of a little ocean god?”

She is _not_ afraid of anyone. She merely wishes to avoid Sokka’s unsolicited counsel.

“Counsel about what?”

Katara makes an indiscriminate noise. She’s not here to discuss Sokka’s infinite un-wisdom. She’s here —

“To seek the sun-fields?”

Katara narrows her eyes, but cannot think of a lie quickly enough.

Toph grins, broad and quick and utterly shameless.

* * *

Katara goes to the sun-fields, straight-backed and dignified despite Toph’s laughter still ringing in her ears.

But the sun-fields are full of destruction. Azula has clearly been holding reign. The blackened fields, the skeletal remains of trees. The bloated cattle, their mouths hanging open and tongues lolling. The area is eerily silent. The sun spirits are all staying far away.

Katara moves silently through the land until she finds a young river sprite cowering beneath withered reeds.

“Where is Azula?”

The river sprite looks hopeful. Has Katara come to claim Azula’s soul?

There’s several tempting answers to that, but Katara shakes her head. She has noticed the droughts, the souls streaming down to her rivers. She wishes to speak to Azula. The destruction will soon begin to tip the balance. Will Azula not listen to reason?

“No,” the sprite says disconsolately. “She thinks she is bound for greatness. She believes she will rise up like the old gods, like her father, and join their fame.” 

Katara frowns.

There is change in the air. She can _feel_ it.

She wishes she could see Zuko again.

* * *

The days grow long. The east currents bring ill omens. High above, in the mortal realm, brother and sister fight on and on and on. Katara watches the shores of the Sea of the Dead, always alert. Koh pulls the dead to the shores, swinging her great boathook out to catch the wisps of souls.

In the realm above, the sun blazes, and mortals grow heatsick, and then —

The storms break.

And so does Azula. The currents whisper that Azula has fallen.

Katara never bothers with the affairs of the living, even when it involves the immortal. The gods go to war, and the floods come, and the fires, and the howling winds. Mountains rise and fall. Cities are built, conquered, destroyed. And still the dead come down, down to the depths below. It matters not which war they died in, which mortal they loved, which deity they angered. They die all the same.

But now she rushes to the shore of the Sea of the Dead. Azula’s defeat would not have come without a price.

Where is Zuko?

Koh stands before her.

_All souls to me._

Not his. Not his.

_Twice he has been promised, and twice he has been taken away. There is a debt._

“I’ll pay it.”

 _All souls to me_ , and this time Koh’s voice is like thunder. _All. All to me._

Katara does not pause. The underworld is her realm, but each guardian and god has their own power, and the balance is delicate. She cannot command Koh any more than she can command the grass in the meadows to grow verdant, or the mists of the marshlands to lift.

She raises her hand. “Not his.”

Koh looks at her, her face smooth and white.

They fight across the shores of the Sea of the Dead. Koh brings down fists as hard as polished bone, her face unmoving all the while. Katara summons the power of the rivers, calling first on the Styx and then Acheron. They come to her, and wreath her in water, and she strikes at Koh. The water rises and falls, the souls of the dead rising like a tide, a crescendo of noise. Again, and again. Koh rushes through the waves, and closes her hands around Katara’s neck with the same precision she uses to hook the souls.

Katara’s necklace shatters.

_All souls to me._

Koh forces Katara to her knees.

_All souls to me. All souls —_

Katara summons the mists, and they roll over her thick as rain clouds, shrouding Koh’s vision. Katara lifts her hand and draws it through the air, the frost twinkling at her fingertips. There’s a gentle creak as the mist freezes around Koh, pinning her into place.

The frost-spell will not last long. Katara gets to her feet and crosses to the shore of the sea, and trails her hand through it. A thousand souls brush past her fingertips, but none of them are his. She withdraws her hand, and shakes the droplets away impatiently. Behind her, she can hear the ice beginning to creak. Koh is escaping.

Where?

She plunges into the icy depths of the Sea of the Dead, and goes against the currents. Where the two oceans meet, living and dead, the dark depths and the light above. Her old home, betwixt the worlds.

Where she first met him.

Katara races upwards, following the light, trying to find a way to the surface —

She calls Sokka, her prayer bright and loud, and moments later a current catches ahold of her shoulder and she is dragged along with it, twisting and turning.

 _Find him_ , she tells Sokka. _Find him for me._

The current rushes onward, gaining momentum, dragging flotsam and jetsam along with it, and it’s becoming warmer now, and the daylight is breaking through, and then —

 _You owe me a favour_ , Sokka says matter-of-factly, and then he’s gone, the current racing along without her.

She’s lying on the icy shore of the halfway world.

Katara pauses, then sits upright and touches a hand to her bare neck. She knew she would win against Koh, but the river guardian had been stronger than Katara had expected. Koh was an old god, and time had lent her power and strength. But she was still, at the heart of it, a small god.

Unlike Katara.

She rises, narrowing her eyes against the bright ice and sunlit tundra. The light refracts through the glaciers, shining white. It almost hurts to look upon. The spirits scurry across the icy landscape, small and fleeting and forgotten.

But her god. Even now, dying and slipping into darkness, he still holds the warmth and glow of a sun-soaked afternoon.

Katara races away across the tundra.

* * *

By all accounts, Zuko should be dying a rapid and unforgiving death. Yet even in the throes of a curse, he’s fiercer than even the sun blazing above.

Katara’s icy hand soothes away the heat from his skin, though he tries to brush her away. There’s a curse in his heart, she thinks. Black and heavy as Koh’s gaze. Unyielding, and evil. It has the mark of a nature deity.

Azula.

“You again,” Zuko says to her, though Katara is not sure to whom he speaks. The fever runs high, and has taken his wits. She frowns and lets her gaze unfocus for a moment, washing away the tiresome debris of the mortal world. She needs to see the spirit world. The landscape crumbles away; the physical bodies vanish from her vision.

A curse of fire, intended to consume him from within. His own strength keeps the curse at bay, but it is flickering brightly, sensing his growing weakness, and poises ready to devour him.

“Come with me,” Katara says.

“You again. You, always you...”

“Always me,” she repeats, and then adds, “You must come with me.”

He hesitates. But death is upon him. She can sense the skeletal hand of Koh, reaching out in the dark, ready to encircle his wrist, and she knows he can sense it too.

“Follow me down,” she says.

And this time, he does.

* * *

Long ago, Katara used to sometimes receive offerings from those who hoped for change. She used to be revered as a nature spirit, for death is a natural part of the cycle of life. Rebirth is only possible through death. Decay is needed for fertile soil. A new story can only begin after the last story ends.

But mortals soon forgot her other duties. Now they speak of her not, afraid to catch her attention. They make few offerings. Nobody wishes for the favour of the goddess of the underworld. Death and decay, ruin and rot. Her corner of the kingdom is cold and dark and lost beneath the oceans.

She takes her sun god with her. He lives yet, and she will draw on her most forgotten powers to restore his breath. This curse can be ended by her. Endings, after all, are Katara’s speciality.

So she takes him to the shadowy halls of her home, and sets about killing the curse.

* * *

“The tides bring strange rumours,” Sokka tells her a week later.

Katara waits, leaning against a sea-dark rock. The seas are calm; Sokka is content. Suki sends a soft breeze over the oceans, moving her fans with a flick of her wrist. It is good weather. The sailors send their thanks to Sokka and Suki. The marine merchants burn offerings in gratitude.

She did not come to the mortal realm to hear strange rumours, though. She came only because Sokka sent a message.

Katara _should_ be interested in strange rumours, Sokka points out. Because the rumour is that Katara has kindly liberated a living deity of their...well, liberation.

“It is considered discourteous,” he says, “to kidnap a god. Even a minor one.”

“I haven’t kidnapped anyone.”

Sokka looks skeptical, and tells her to return Zuko at once to the mortal realm. He is a sun god, and without him, the crops will die and the fields will thin.

When he’s well, she promises Sokka. Zuko is resting. When he’s well, he will return.

Sokka does not look pleased.

As Katara leaves, Suki sweeps her golden fans through the air, sending another breeze over the clear, sparkling seas.

She turns.

Suki smiles at her.

* * *

Zuko slips in and out of fitful sleep for a time. When he wakes proper, he regards Katara with suspicion. He knows her name, he knows her realm — ought he not be standing before the River Styx, a coin beneath his tongue?

“You are not dead,” Katara says.

There’s a pause, then Zuko says, “You spared me?”

Which is a ridiculous thing to say, because she is Katara, impassive and balanced, ruling the underworld without intervening. She cannot command a soul to return to a cooling body; she cannot undo that final judgement. She rules the underworld, but she does not rule death.

So she lifts her chin slightly, and says, “Death was not your fate.”

Well. She rules death not, but perhaps she can whisper in its ear.

Zuko does not so easily believe her words. He offers a suspicious look, but says, “Thank you.”

The faintest warmth tinges his voice, and for a moment Katara brightens, and thinks perhaps he’ll stay – just a while longer — and they can speak again.

But then Zuko sits up and says he needs to return to the mortal realm. Without his light and warmth, the crops will wither.

“I know,” Katara says, and she falls silent.

They look at each other for a moment, and Katara opens her mouth. But there’s a little twinge somewhere along the rivers. Katara turns her face, listening carefully. A mortal hero has died, and is patiently awaiting judgment. She never judges the souls for herself — Minos, Rhada, and Aeacus are the three spirits who consider the debts a life has incurred. But she will greet this mortal herself, and escort them to their final resting place.

Duty never stops its ceaseless call.

* * *

Katara recognises the man standing before her. He stands tall, chin lifted, his gaze direct. Three arrows are still buried in his back, their feathers trembling slightly as he steps forward.

“Iphitos,” Katara says. The judgement upon him is of little surprise to her. Iphitos has been judged, and his soul is near weightless. He has made his sacrifices, done his duty, and died with honour.

Iphitos bows his head. Katara reaches out and plucks the arrows out; she removes them as easily as drawing them through water. There is no resistance. There is no pain.

Katara turns to lead Iphitos away, and Zuko is there, studying them curiously. Katara doesn’t usher him away, and he follows silently.

They walk through the valleys and the misted fields. Past the Asphodel Meadows, where the ordinary souls dwell; those who lived small, decent lives. They wander through the grass dotted with tall white flowers, content and quiet.

Past the Fields of Mourning, where goes the souls who wasted their lives in pursuit of unrequited love. These fields are dark green, dotted with groves of myrtles, and the melancholy souls drift along the paths, pausing to collect the heavy white heads of the agapanthus flowers.

Yet still these meadows lay in the soft dusk of Katara’s realm, and it is only the last few steps that the sunlight begins to bloom to life. Here is Elysium, the realm for the most distinguished of souls, and the wide green plains are lit by tentative sunlight. In the distance, a white curve of sand fades into a sunlit sea. A breeze lifts high over the land, bringing cool relief.

Here is where Katara’s realm ends. 

_To Elysium_ , she murmurs to Iphitos.

He smiles at her and steps forward, his feet sinking into the sweet grass and bright wildflowers.

He does not look back.

* * *

Zuko is silent for the long descent back to the heart of the underworld. As they cross a river, wide and sweeping, he suddenly asks its name.

“This one?” Katara pauses. The river murmurs to her like an old friend. “This is Lethe. She is kind, and generous.”

“Lethe. The goddess of oblivion?” Zuko asks doubtfully.

“Reincarnation isn’t possible if the shades of the dead hold fast to their earthly memories. Lethe lets them forget all.”

“Oh.” He pauses, then says, “What of the other rivers?”

Katara speaks of them, and she does so fondly; this is her home. She knows it. Acheron, the river of woe, where souls must go to cleanse their sins and sorrows. Styx, dark as night, that serves to separate the underworld from the mortal realm. Phlegethon, river of fire. Cocytus, soft and sad, where the rush of the water becomes a thousand lamentations, and the beat of water upon rocks is a funeral dirge. All converge in the great marshy delta, where the soil is thick with rich black loam and the reeds grow tall.

Zuko considers her stories as they walk towards the River Styx, and as they pass a spiny shrub, he reaches out to pluck a ripe pomegranate from it.

“Don’t,” Katara says quickly. “You mustn’t eat the food of the underworld, or you will belong here.”

Zuko drops his hand at once and steps away from the shrub. He casts his gaze instead across the lands. “You’ve spoken of the meadows and fields, where the ordinary go. And what of the damned?”

Tartarus, where the new gods cast down the old, including Ozai. But that is not within the underworld. That is even farther below. Katara does not know much of it, same as she does not know well Elysium, which dwells farther above.

“Do you like it here?”

It’s her home.

“But do you like it?”

Katara lifts her face.

Yes.

* * *

Later, as Zuko prepares to leave, she wishes she had drawn the courage to ask him if _he_ liked it. But of course, she could not, because she thinks she would find his answer disappointing.

And yet —

She hopes.

* * *

Change comes bright and warm on the heels of long days. The sun rises high in a cloudless sky. The mortals are soft and lazy in the sunshine; the gods are — for once — content. On a warm night with high stars, Katara roams the sun-fields and finds Zuko resting alongside a river, though it has slowed to a mere trickle.

Come to the ocean, Katara tells him. Where it is cool.

They spend a little while in the waters of Oceanus, letting the tides carry them to shore, and Katara allows herself the scant luxury of touch: she brushes by Zuko’s shoulder, and touches his wrist just once, and cups his heel to help him climb up the cliffs that ring the beach. He’s warm, but it’s not the bright fire of anger like his sister. It’s a steady glow deep within his chest, like a warm coal.

“Your hands are cold,” he tells her.

Katara drops her hands to her side and glances away, but when she looks back, Zuko does not look displeased. In fact, he’s smiling at her.

She smiles back at him.

* * *

When they part ways, Zuko steps back onto sandy shores. Katara watches him for just a moment — the outline of him in the light of the stars, vanishing from sight, leaving only the faintest footprints in the sand.

She returns to the depths below. She cannot stay long in the mortal world.

 _Don’t follow me down_ , she told him once.

But that was a long time ago.

* * *

The days become even longer. Katara does not venture to the mortal realm. She sits instead in her cool halls, and wanders the open fields and shady myrtle groves. She visits the Fields of Mourning and sits beside Eriphyle, one of the souls who has roamed the fields for a long while. Eriphyle hides beneath the shade of an ancient cypress tree, her body still marked with the wounds of her death, and murmurs lamentations to the damp air.

Katara always had a soft spot for the Fields of Mourning. The souls are quiet and often lost in reflection. The air is still, cool, but not heavy. The paths meander through bowed meadow-grass and gnarled trees. It is not unpleasant. Often she visits the fields to enjoy the quietness.

And yet...

Deep down, she can feel it beginning to call her. The fields recognise a soul that may, one day, belong here.

Katara stands up abruptly. Eriphyle hardly notices; her whispered laments continue. The fields go on and on. The dark green lines of the cypress trees seem suddenly intimidating, their shade gloomy rather than welcoming.

She departs, and does not look back.

* * *

She visits the sun-fields once more, just for the pleasure of watching Zuko cast sunlight over his domain. He catches her eye and smiles, and tells her to stay a while longer.

She cannot. She must return to the depths below.

He hesitates. He’s heard the only way to the underworld is through certain hidden portals and gateways, fraught with danger, and yet she seems to come and go through rivers and seas...?

Ah, Katara says. But _she_ is different. She is the dread queen, and chooses her own ways of travel.  
  
And a moment later she realises the unasked question, and adds — tentatively, uncertain and yet hopeful —

“Would you like to follow me down?”

He nods.

* * *

When they arrive in her realm he smiles at her, and she knows then. She knows that if he never takes her hand, she will be forever destined to the gloomy groves and towering cypress trees of the Fields of Mourning.

But he _does_ take her hand, and she can feel the warmth of him, the heady promise of sunshine and dry grass, and for a moment she dreams. It is easy to dream, when he is by her side and walking through her world. When he’s watching the rivers rush past, or wandering across the delta, or gazing curiously upon the creatures who guard the entrance to the underworld: the centaurs running swift and wild, Geryon the warrior-giant with his shield the size of a boulder. The harpies soaring aloft, their wings beating ceaseless, and the swift-footed chimaera breathing bright fire.

“What’s this?” Zuko asks, touching the rough bark of an ancient elm tree.

“Where the dreams sleep.” Katara reaches for a green leaf, turning it over. On the underside, clinging to the soft, pale surface, is a tiny shadow. It rouses slightly, then settles again. “The oneiroi.” She glances up at Zuko, catching a soft expression.

“There’s so much to see,” he says, touching a leaf. “A tree of dreams...”

“Stay a little longer, then.”

He glances at her, then away, and her heart falters. He looks at the tree for a long moment, then slowly turns over a leaf. The oneiros curls up, a sleeping shadow.

“Just a moment,” he says at last.

Just a moment.

That’s all she wants.

* * *

_Just a moment_ becomes days. Zuko roams the wide river plains, and wanders over the Asphodel Meadows. Together, they walk by the rivers. When the misting rain comes, they duck beneath the tree of dreams and watch the water bend down the boughs and drip from the leaves. The oneiroi huddle closer, and Katara makes a comment — she doesn’t even recall later what it was, something light about the funny little oneiroi — but she remembers Zuko’s arm warm around her shoulders, the steady weight of it, and the quickening of her heart.

And then Sokka ruined it all by showing up at the gates of the underworld himself.

* * *

Katara has to leave Zuko beneath the elm; whatever Sokka is going to say, she has the feeling Zuko ought not hear it.

She’s right.

“He needs to go _back_. To the _mortal_ realm. He doesn’t _belong_ here.”

He _could_ , Katara begins, but Sokka shakes his head.

“He’s a sun god. Sunshine and warmth and light. There is nothing here for him.”

Katara says nothing. Sokka looks at her face, then sighs.

“I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m trying to _save_ you from hurt.”

“Just...let us be,” Katara says. “A while longer.”

There is no _longer_. That’s the reason Sokka is here: Zuko is a sun god. Without him, the crops are withering. The wild heather is wilting. The trees are shedding their dying leaves. “He needs to return, Katara. He cannot stay.”

Katara nods. Of course, she says.

Because she always knew it was only going to last a moment.

* * *

Zuko leaves.

It’s fine, she tells herself, and she busies herself tending to her realm, keeping the dead where they ought to be. Every soul in their rightful place. She is Katara, queen of the underworld, and she has far more important things to consider than a sun god with eyes of gold.

She shivers as she walks by the Fields of Mourning. It seems to have gotten cold lately, which bewilders her. It has always been cold. She never noticed before.

Before.

Before _him_.

She hurries onwards. Behind her, in the Fields of Mourning, the cypress trees stand tall and solemn.

Patiently waiting.

* * *

A month later, Zuko arrives on the shores of the river delta, and Katara goes to greet him at once, fearing the worst. But he is alive and unscathed; no curse darkens his heart, and he smiles at her tentatively and says he’s visiting, as if it’s nothing, as if visitors come to the underworld all the time just for the pleasure of speaking with her.

Katara gets flustered.

It is not easy to fluster the dread queen of the underworld, but Zuko has managed it and he looks almost pleased about it.

So she speaks to him, and they walk by the River Lethe, and past the Asphodel Meadows, and Zuko says Azula has descended into complete madness now, and the sky-fathers have stripped her of her powers. She will never return. To Zuko have gone the sun-fields, and they are now solely his to rule. Katara tells him she is happy for him, and she is, because he deserves the bright sky and the green meadows and the soft sunlight.

He does not deserve _this_ , she thinks as she looks around her cold kingdom, and she recalls Sokka’s words to her.

Zuko notices her expression. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Sokka has been offering counsel, that’s all.”

“And it was unwelcome?” Zuko asks, stopping beneath the leaf-laced branches of the tree of dreams.

Katara thinks of Sokka’s words. “He spoke only the truth,” she says at last. “There is nothing for you here.”

Zuko looks at her, and says, “There _is_ something.”

Katara doesn’t dare hope, but a flicker rises in her heart anyway. “But you cannot stay.”

He pauses, and she waits for him to look away, to sigh, to quietly agree.

But he reaches out instead, his hand warm upon her face — oh, she always did think of his warm hands — and she leans into his touch as though she is destined to sense the light and seek it always. Her sun god, with his warm hands and his warm mouth. 

And when he kisses her, he tastes of pomegranate.

Around them, the oneroi begin to rouse from their slumber.

* * *

Zuko leaves, though, as he must. 

But he always returns. 

The mortals name his absence from their world _winter_ , and the world grows quiet and dark and the fields of gold become cold and empty. And, at the height of his return, when he pours sunlight across the world and brings brightness and warmth, they call it _summer_.

And so the seasons are born, and they come and go, and Zuko stays and leaves.

But he always, always comes back.

Katara remembers the shallows of her childhood. The oceanids laughing and splashing. The souls of the little children, chasing each other. The pink tundra, warm with the blood of sacrifices. The black rivers like veins. She remembers Zuko in his clothes of red and gold, and his dark hair and bright eyes. He’d been so young then — as had she. The underworld realm was a faraway whisper. She didn’t know that one day she would rule over it. She did not know, when she caught ahold of Zuko’s hand and pulled him free of the black water, that one day she would command that very current.

_All souls to me._

But Zuko, she thinks, was always somehow hers.

And perhaps it was never the depths below that called her. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(Podfic of) (Don't) Follow Me Down by Eleventy7](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29623836) by [bulletproofteacup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bulletproofteacup/pseuds/bulletproofteacup), [The JD Tea Hour (RideBoldlyRide)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RideBoldlyRide/pseuds/The%20JD%20Tea%20Hour)




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